FROM UMRAO Jaan
to Pakeezah to
Chandramukhi,
the figure of the
tawaif has been a
figure of fascination in the
popular South Asian imagination:
the bejewelled, sensuous
dancing girl with a golden
voice – and almost always, a
golden heart. To our Hindifilm-
overloaded eyes, therefore,
it may seem strange for
an instant to look upon the
black and white images of
women who populate The
Other Song, Saba Dewan’s
film about tawaifs, looking
out of the frame at us with a
gravitas we do not expect.

Dewan asks tawaif after tawaif if
they’ve ever heard the version that
goes, ‘My breasts are wounded’

But the gravitas is
ephemeral. In one revealing
moment, the camera pans an
old album, with the moving
finger on screen stopping at
a pleasantly plump face. The
grainy voice of an old sarangi
player says, “Yeh Rasoolan
Bai hain.” The filmmaker
asks, “Kya yeh hamesha itne
saade kapde pehentin thi? (Did she always wear such
plain clothes?)” The reply is
brusque and quietly ironic: “Mujra naach toh karna
nahi tha. (Well, she wasn’t
going to dance the mujra.)”

Rasoolan Bai gave up the
mujra – the expressive,
sometimes suggestive
kathak-based dance that
accompanied the tawaif ’s music – in 1948. At the same
time that she moved out of
her kotha and into a gali ka
makaan in Banaras, the
woman whose aching songs
were perhaps India’s most
famous renditions of the
thumri stopped performing
in her own city. The timing
is remarkable. As India and
Pakistan entered independent
nationhood, the thumri
was taken out of the kotha. A musical genre whose very
form — intimate, expressive,
always sung in a first-person
female voice — had emerged
from the courtesan’s salon, had, in order to survive in
the bright light of modernity,
to move into the concert
hall, the radio station, the
cinema. And in order to be
heard in this new world, the
tawaif herself had to become
a ganewali or – in even more
Sanskritised form – a gayika.

Rasoolan Bai

(b. 1902) married a
Banarasi sari dealer but
never quite made the shift to
domesticity. She once
entered an All India Radio
portrait gallery to note wryly, “Everyone else has become a
devi, I am the only bai left!”

The most famous of such
successful metamorphoses is
that of Akhtari Bai Faizabadi
into Begum Akhtar. The
courtesan who had achieved
fame in her teens became a
respectably married lady,
even giving up her singing
career for years, “only to
emerge into the public domain
transformed into a national symbol iconic of the
courtly musical culture
which had shaped her,”
writes scholar Regula
Qureshi. But the nation exacted
its toll. In order to be
the voice of a new India,
Akhtari Bai had to live a double
life – her newfound respectable
status was
dependent on dissociating
herself from every shred of
her past, while the power she
had over her audience, what
independent scholar and historian
Saleem Kidwai calls
“chemistry”, derived in large
measure from that very past.

Saba Dewan’s fascinating
film, The Other Song, derives naits
name from a similar instance
of doubling, of a repressed
erotic self. Told by a
respected Banarasi musician
called Shivkumar Shastri
that Rasoolan Bai had once
recorded a different version
of her famous Bhairavi
thumri “Lagat karejwa mein
chot (My heart is wounded)”,
Dewan set out in search of
the lesser-known variation.
As she asks musician after
musician (and later, tawaif
after tawaif) if they’ve ever
heard the version that goes, “Lagat jobanwa mein chot (My breasts are wounded)”,
without success, we begin to
see glimpses of a hidden
world, a world whose frank
sexuality and often joyful
bawdiness were pushed deep
below the surface, often by
its own practitioners. Song
after song turns out to have had its lyrics altered to suit
‘respectable’ tastes – from soibe (sleep) to jaibe (go),
choli (blouse) to odhni (veil).

The tawaifs of North
India (like South India’s devadasis) came from
hereditary performing communities.
According to
historian Katherine Butler
Brown, the term tawaif was
first used to describe communities
of female singers
and dancers in Dargah Quli
Khan’s Muraqqa’-i Dehli (1739-41). But it was not
until the early 19th century
that it became a catch-all
term. Even then, Brown argues,
before 1857 there was
always a distinction made “between elite tawaif who
were highly cultured, highly
refined, models of etiquette
and masters of performance
genres, who might only have
had a single sexual patron in
their lifetime; and tawaifs who were less talented, less
well trained, and thus more
dependent on sex work”

Akhtari Bai

(b. 1915) was a famous
singer when she married a
barrister and stopped
singing. She fell ill; music
was prescribed as the only
remedy. She returned to the
studios in 1949, becoming
known as Begum Akhtar

BUT AFTER 1857, when
British Crown Law
came into effect
throughout India, all tawaifs were criminalised alongside
common prostitutes, with
court judgements stating
that singing and dancing
were ‘vestigial’ activities
while their real income came
from prostitution. Meanwhile,
the rising middle
class, “influenced by Victorian
values and empowered
by colonial law, increasingly dismissed the tawaif as
immoral and decadent, and
began various moves to ‘rescue’
Hindustani music from
them,” says Brown. The campaign
for a national music —
cleansed of its associations
with tawaifs and Muslim
musicians — aimed to make
it appropriate for middle
class women. In a stunning
double move, the very
processes that enabled
‘respectable’ women to come
out of purdah worked to
invisibilise the highly skilled,
often highly educated,
women who had been ‘in
public’ all along: the tawaif.

With the decline of the
feudal patronage that had sustained the kotha and its
arts, many tawaifs explored
other options. All India
Radio (AIR) in its early days
was almost entirely dependent
on the ganewalis, as
were recording companies: it
was tawaifs like Gauhar Jan
who were the first gramophone
superstars. But in the
early 2000s, a skilled singer
like Saira Begum (one of the
women from tawaif backgrounds
that Dewan shot
with) gets a recording slot at
AIR in Banaras because of a
zealous Italian pupil, only to
be humiliated with a ‘musical
theory’ examination she
cannot possibly pass.

As the new guardians of
music locked it up and shut
the door, women from
tawaif backgrounds entered
first the theatre company,
and later, the movies. “Cinema
becomes a part of tawaif history, documenting
tawaifi arts we’d never get to
see – and also providing a
way for the tawaif to reinvent
herself,” says Kidwai.
“And this reinvention was
both on screen and off it. If
Hema Malini in Sharafat wears plumes and a tiara to
do a mujra, one can’t complain
of inauthenticity: many
real tawaifs like Siddheshwari
learnt to sing in English
– even if it was Twinkle
Twinkle Little Star!” The
tawaif’s remaking of self, as
Kidwai points out, could
take more radical forms:
such as in the case of Nargis,
whose mother Jaddan Bai
prepared her for a cinematic
career by teaching her
everything except how to
sing. The stardom of Nargis
– the ganewali’s daughter
divorced from the gana – demonstrated one route by
which the tawaif could make
it in the modern world. (It is
tempting to conclude that
this was the necessary
obverse of the rise of the
playback singer – the disembodied
female voice who
retained respectability by
never being seen on screen.)

Fatima Rashid

(b. 1929) was the daughter
of renowned Allahabadbased
tawaif Jaddan Bai. Her
mother, an actress and a film
producer, groomed her for a
film career but specifically
did not teach her music –
and Nargis was born

CINEMA, THOUGH, isn’t
an accessible career
for most women. The
two other films in Saba
Dewan’s trilogy address more
subterranean worlds of
female performance. Delhi-
Mumbai-Delhi (D-M-D) centres
on Riya, who dances in a
bar in Mumbai but is from
Delhi, while Naach is about
girls who dance to Bollywood
numbers on massive, rickety
stages in the town of Sonpur,
between Muzaffarpur and
Patna, during the annual cattle
fair. For Dewan, the differences
between these
categories of women outweigh
any similarities. Her
D-M-D protagonist Riya,
from an ordinary working
class background, may have
gained confidence and decision-
making power within
her family, but she remains
wage labour. “The tawaif was
much more her own mistress:
the owner of the space, the
person who paid the accompanists,”
says Dewan.

Whether we like it or not,
though, the tawaif remains
the imagined reference
point. “There is an attempt
to recreate the mujra past,
mediated via Hindi films,”
acknowledges Dewan. “In
Bombay bars, the girls wear
so-called Indian costume –
ghaghra choli, partly because
it’s easier to get license for ‘Indian dance’, but also because
it fits the audience’s
appetite. The man there
wants to imagine Rekha
dancing for him, at least.”
Even the filmic bar dancer
draws on the pure tawaif of
the 1970s Hindi movie: Tabu
in Chandni Bar must remain
chaste while working in a
bar, just like Asha Parekh in
the kotha of Main Tulsi Tere
Aangan Ki.

But the relationship between
bar dancers and
tawaifs runs deeper. Ethnomusicologist
Anna Morcom
estimates that 80-90 percent
of Mumbai bar dancers, “by
informal accounts”, are
hereditary professional performers
from tribes like the
Deredar, Nat, Bedia and
Kanjar. They have also been
the target of a moral campaign
eerily similar to the
Anti-Nautch campaigns of a
century ago. In 2005, a ban
on dancing in Mumbai bars
made 75,000 such women
redundant. It is still in force.

In early 20th century
India, it was dance that seemed
to lie at the root of moral
opprobrium. The tawaif gave
up the mujra to acquire respectability
as a concert
singer or actress. But in a
newly-globalised India where
‘Bollywood dance’ is now a legitimitised
‘cool’ activity for
the urban middle classes –
think NRI/urban weddings,
Shiamak Davar classes, TV
shows like Boogie Woogie and
Nach Baliye, feeding back
into films like Dilli-6 or Rab
Ne Bana Di Jodi – how does
dance re- acquire its immoral
connotations when performed
by women in bars? That is
a new double standard that
will take longer to resolve.